The Reverberate Hills; or The Apotheosis of the Narwhal

Haiku 2012/27

2012-01-27T15:42:00.000-08:00

stripped boughs, black with rain
matted brown leaves, slick with rain
air washed clean with rain

Haiku 2012/26

2012-01-26T20:31:00.000-08:00

everywhere but here
icy winter water drops
stripped boughs, black with rain

Haiku 2012/25

2012-01-25T21:09:00.000-08:00

anywhere but here
pale blue skies, a crisp cool breeze
everywhere but here

Haiku 2012/24

2012-01-24T21:59:00.000-08:00

off to work we go
pale blue skies, a crisp cool breeze
anywhere but here

Venetian Masters at the DeYoung

2012-01-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

Back before they rebuilt the DeYoung Museum but after they realized they needed to, there was some talk about relocating the museum from Golden Gate Park downtown, closer to other museums like the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Contemporary Museum, the Cartoon Art Museum, and the Museum of the African Diaspora, where it would be more accessible to the rest of the Bay Area and help form sort of a "museum district." I thought this was a great idea, but nothing came of it (oh, the unseen backstage intrigues that shape our existences!), and the DeYoung remains a long trek out of the way for most Bay Area residents.

I’ve never regretted the museum’s location more than during its magnificent current show, Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power, a jaw-dropping assortment of Mantegnas, Giorgiones, Titians, Tintorettos, and Veroneses (along with assorted others) on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. If the DeYoung were as accessible as SFMoMA, I’d be visiting this collection once or twice a week, the way I did with the Stein collection this summer. If you have any interest in Italian Renaissance painting, Venetian art, Old Masters, pictures of pretty naked people, or just great art in general, you really need to see this show. I’m hoping to go back again before it closes February 12.

On my first visit I was in the gift shop buying the very attractive and inexpensive catalogue and some prints and postcards, and a young saleswoman proudly pointed out that the DeYoung is the only venue for this show. I asked why that was. She told me that the galleries in Vienna were being redone. I already knew that, so I explained that what I meant was Why here? I didn’t want to come right out and say, “Why here, instead of a more prestigious venue like the Metropolitan or the National Gallery?” She didn’t know why. Another of those unseen backstage intrigues, I guess.

Whatever the reason, I’m grateful. It’s hard to describe how stunned and excited I was to turn a corner and see, in all its glorious jeweler’s precision, Mantegna’s St Sebastian, something I’ve known in reproduction most of my life. And here was the actual, irreplaceable thing! (Also: I don’t usually associate Mantegna with Venetian art, though he was active in Padua, which is close to Venice and was part of the Venetian republic at that time. But he comes down pretty clearly on the side of line as form rather than color as form, which is what the Venetian painters were famous for (to put it in terms of their contemporary art theory, he favored disegno over colore).)

And then to turn another corner and come across the enigmatic poetry of Giorgione, with his melting lucid landscapes and the calmly assertive looks of his many-meaninged figures, then to the bold Titians with their glowing nude women (and his later canvases, where the increasingly vivid brushwork almost takes over as the subject of the picture, in the modern way), and then to the Mannerist elongations of Palma Vecchio’s Bathing Nymphs, and the lambent rows of what a wall label amusingly and accurately describes as “beautiful anonymous blonde women,” and then to the vivid Tintorettos and the lush Veroneses . . . the DeYoung has become, temporarily at least, one of the great museums.

There are a few interesting labels discussing the changes due to the use of oil paints from tempera (richer, thicker colors) and canvas rather than wood (a different surface texture). Frescoes were less significant in Venice as well, due to the general dampness of the climate, which is nice for us since panels can travel and frescoes can’t (though frankly I can’t believe some of these paintings were available for loan – the St Sebastian, Giorgione’s Three Philosophers, Titian’s Danae – these, and others in the show, are some of the great images of Renaissance art).

Some of the assertions on the wall labels seem dubious, like the one about Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders (I’m quoting the version in the catalogue): “Men often displayed paintings of this kind in bedrooms, to remind their wives about proper married behavior.” Really? Susanna was a virtuous young wife, spied upon in her bath by two lecherous old men, pillars of the community. In an early example of sexual harassment, they threatened to claim she was an adulteress unless she actually became one with them. She refused and they accused. She was about to be stoned to death based on their calumnies when the prophet Daniel, then a boy, rose up and insisted on questioning the two old men separately (CSI: Ancient Israel!). Their contradictory answers exposed their falsehood, and the crowd stoned them to death, instead of the virtuous Susanna. If you know this story, and I assume any Renaissance Venetian who would own a Tintoretto would, it seems a lot more like a warning about proper married behavior for husbands. Tintoretto’s lushly decorative version may lack the psychological intensity of Artemisia Gentileschi’s versions, but it’s perfectly clear that his naked woman is pure of heart and his crouching old voyeurs are not.

I can only hope that some day the Kunsthistorisches Museum decides to redo their Pieter Brueghel galleries, with the Bay Area once again the beneficiary. If that happened I really would trek out to the DeYoung once or twice a week, no matter how awful the bus rides.

Haiku 2012/23

2012-01-23T18:39:00.000-08:00

making pale the stars
sinking to silver-white dawn
off we go to work

Haiku 2012/22

2012-01-22T14:52:00.000-08:00

headlights floating by
traffic lights red green yellow
making pale the stars

Haiku 2012/21

2012-01-21T22:18:00.000-08:00

waiting for a bus
glaring, blaring, hurrying
headlights floating by

Haiku 2012/20

2012-01-20T14:43:00.001-08:00

ant-like scurrying
rain slaps down the dirty streets
waiting for a bus

Haiku 2012/19

2012-01-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

I stand in between
two large windows high above
ant-like scurrying

Haiku 2012/18

2012-01-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

sun stuck overhead
shadows pooled around my feet
I stand in between

Haiku 2012/17

2012-01-17T19:07:00.000-08:00

watching the time go
staring at a glowing screen
sun stuck overhead

Haiku 2012/16

2012-01-16T21:03:00.000-08:00

straightening to dark
bustling clerks arrange the shelves
watching the time go

Haiku 2012/15

2012-01-15T16:47:00.000-08:00

grass waves on the fields
bending to a lighter shade,
straightening to dark

Haiku 2012/14

2012-01-14T15:10:00.000-08:00

rivers snake through fields
snakes ripple through the rivers
grass waves on the fields

Haiku 2012/13

2012-01-13T19:54:00.001-08:00

still silence below
the airplane's steady humming . . .
rivers snake through fields

Haiku 2012/12

2012-01-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

even birds still sleep
moon unmoving up above
still silence below

Haiku 2012/11

2012-01-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

silent horizons
two gleaners pass the trash bins
even birds still sleep

wild at heart

2012-01-10T21:17:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday night I went to Berkeley Rep to see the Kneehigh Theater’s production of The Wild Bride, which is an adaptation of The Maiden Without Hands, one of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. A couple of years ago I missed Kneehigh’s production of Brief Encounter at ACT; I really love that movie so I was wary of any adaptations and by the time I heard enough praise to make me think I should go it was too late in the run for me to make the schedules work. I thought I was going to miss The Wild Bride as well, which made me kind of sad since it sounded like something I’d really like: a folk tale staged with lots of music and theatrical savvy and the suggestive and creative use of props (similar in style to some of the Mary Zimmerman plays I’ve seen and enjoyed). Then Berkeley Rep extended the run to 22 January, so The Wild Bride became my first performance of 2012, and my first big disappointment.

The short version is that the staging is often clever and inventive, but the script just isn’t there. Here’s the long version:

To start with, everything – dialogue as well as music – is miked, so all the sound has that slightly off-center, flattened quality. All the actors had ugly little body mikes taped to their heads, and at least one had a long wire snaking down her back, which was distracting when she danced. The sound itself wasn’t all that bad – I’ve experienced much, much worse on Broadway – but I’m wondering why the miking was done at all. The Roda Theater is fairly small, and if your voice can’t fill it, you probably shouldn’t be on stage. But this seems to be standard procedure at Berkeley Rep these days; in fact the playbill had an interview with Elliott Ares, holder of the first Harry Weininger Sound Fellowship, who spoke casually about body mikes as if there was no question they were standard issue. Why should I go to live theater if I’m not getting live sound?

Speaking of the playbill, it contained an extremely odd “Prologue” from managing director Susan Medak, gushing on and on about the late Steve Jobs with his “rich capacity to dream” and “unfettered imagination” and what a “wildly creative visionary” he was etc etc and oh yeah here’s a little afterthought we’re presenting this theater group called Kneehigh – can boilerplate gush? Because we all saw reams of this standard-issue ass-kissing right after Jobs died, and with all due respect to him and his influence, I don’t really get it, but then I’m not a tech groupie-cultist or a CEO groupie-cultist, and I think most of his products actually help further marginalize live performance, and so much for theater that is “trying to change the world, one play at a time,” to quote another part of the playbill.

Speaking of changing the world, I hope all those little Chinese child laborers assembling Apple products are appropriately grateful that their nimble and pennies-per-hour fingers are helping to implement the creative vision of the Great and Beloved Leader! (Talk about accidentally selling your children to the devil! which, by the way, is the starting point of The Wild Bride.) Can we acknowledge that "creative visioning" is just more readily available to those who can afford Berkeley Rep's ticket prices in this economy? (In fairness to Ms Medak, I will assume that in a later “Prologue” she will say something about the late Vaclav Havel, a genuinely great man who actually had something to do with theater.)

Here’s another random complaint, before I get to the problems with the play itself: the evening would have been much better without the intermission, which doesn’t do much besides stall whatever momentum has been developed (there were no set changes or other technical reasons that I could see for needing a pause) . Played without an intermission, the performance would be about an hour and forty-five minutes, which is not unreasonable, and it would have been easy enough to pare back some of the more repetitious dancing and singing to bring it in at 90 minutes – I really enjoyed the bluesy music, but how many times do you need to hear about Ezekiel and the dry bones now hear the word of the Lord? As it was, the performance lasted just long enough to make me miss my train by one minute, so that I had to sit in the station for almost twenty minutes, stewing in my disappointed juices.

I’m going to give a bit of a plot summary now, so consider yourself spoiler-alerted. Playwright and director Emma Rice, who is also the co-Artistic Director of Kneehigh, changed the story in some interesting and significant ways from the original, which I read after seeing the play, though unfortunately she didn't always substitute anything but theatrical flash:

There is a loving but perpetually drunken woodsman who meets a stranger, who offers him great wealth in return for whatever is in his backyard. The woodsman thinks it’s just his old apple tree, not realizing his beloved daughter is climbing the tree. (The girl is portrayed by three different women at three different stages of her life, and they don’t particularly look, act, or sound alike, which I liked because it gives a nice sense of the different possibilities in the one character.) The stranger turns out to be the Devil, who comes to collect his payment, only he can’t because the girl is too clean, and the Devil hates anything clean (though he does manage to pick her up and mime raping her before he realizes he has that little problem).

So the Woodsman is ordered to dirty her, which he does with a bucket of slick beige mud. But she weeps so much her hands become clean, and the Devil still can’t carry her off, so he insists the Woodsman chop off her hands. He does so, in a scene that is both highly stylized and completely terrifying (the woman next to me covered her eyes): she extends her hands one at a time, sobbing; his axe comes down on the tree-stump in front of her (which is of course a safe distance ahead of the actress's arms), and one of the other two women takes that hand and dips it into a bucket of shiny dripping red paint. It's simple but striking and effective and the kind of effect that can only work in the theater. The mutilated girl is still too good for the Devil, so he declares he will let the world dirty her, and when it does, he will be back for her. Pause for unnecessary intermission.

The armless girl leaves her father. She discovers an orchard with numbered pears (cleverly presented by lightbulbs with large numbers hanging from them). She is hungry but cannot reach the pears without hands. The trees benevolently bend down so she can eat a pear. She is discovered by the orchard owner, who is the King. He is inexplicably Scottish, complete with kilt, though he becomes less Scottish as the evening progresses, and his mother doesn’t sound Scottish at all. The Scottish king is played by the same actor who played her father (which is kind of creepy), only then he had an Irish accent, which also seemed to be the only such accent in the vicinity. Kneehigh is a British troupe and presumably all this tomfoolery with accents makes some sense to them. Since I am part Irish I feel I should at least note the possibility of offense, if not from giving the only drunkard the only Irish accent, then from the moldiness of the stereotype.

The king falls instantly in love with the strange silent handless girl, because that is the role of men in these stories: if you’re not of high (in fact, the highest!) social status and willing to fall instantly in love, you might as well be a dwarf or a weakling father, abandoned after a paragraph or two. In the original story the King has a pair of silver hands made for the girl, but here they are big ungainly instruments of steel or iron; one ends with strange straggling twig-like fingers and the other with a scimitar. No use is made of these extensions and it’s unclear why he gives her such ungainly implements, especially since he makes jokes about how dangerous they are during their cheerfully, relentlessly vulgar and overextended sex scene, during which they enthusiastically act out a variety of positions.

The King goes off to fight a war, battling amid much dry ice and many strobe lights. The Wild Bride gives birth. His mother sends him the news. (The mother is portrayed, in another clever bit of staging, by a large portrait of an elegant woman in the eighteenth-century style with large holes where her hands would be, so that one of the actresses not playing the Bride can insert her hands through the holes and gesture appropriately; there are golden pears on the frame and a white wire chandelier hanging nearby that is also shaped like a pear, so there’s definitely a pear thing going on.)

The Devil intercepts the letter and substitutes one saying the child is half-dog. The King says to love it anyway. The Devil intercepts that letter too and substitutes one saying to kill the Wild Bride and the child and to save her eyeballs and tongue as proof that his order was carried out. His mother can’t bring herself to do this, so she warns the Bride to flee with the child. The mother then, with her bare royal hands, rips out the eyeballs and tongue of a delightful large puppet doe. Red streamers shoot out from her violated orifices, and the gentle creature dies, deserving better.

I might be making this sound a little more entertaining than it was. The bluesy music was certainly enjoyable. I kept wishing that the jogtrot rhymes weren’t so often clumsy and obvious, and padded out, and that some of the singing and dancing had been tightened up a bit.

The Bride heeds the warning and wanders in the frozen forest for years. We are told she and her child are in imminent danger of starvation, but she actually seems to be fine and does a little kick-boxy dance indicative of – ugh, let me hold my nose with one hand and extend the meaningless jargon term out to arm’s length with the other – “empowerment.” It seems to me she’d be better off figuring out how to fish or hunting for berries or something actually helpful and specific rather than some generic emotional mood that would in reality crumple in no time against the hardness of the world, but I am impressed at how clearly her stance and fist-pumping and striding indicate “empowerment” without also looking completely hacky and ridiculous, so good on ya, choreographer! The meaning was clear enough to the well-dressed, middle-aged frosted blonde in the middle of the front row (I was at the end of the row) who raised her glass and went, “Yeah!” Earlier in the second act the same woman had started talking a bit too loudly. Berkeley Rep might want to rethink its policy of allowing beverages in the auditorium, at least when it comes to wine.

The Wild Bride’s hands have now grown back – for no particular reason, they just regenerate, apparently as a result of her feeling “empowered,” because that is how cells behave. The regeneration makes sense in the original story, which is filled with benevolent Heaven-aided miracles, but less so here. Compassion for suffering creatures is a spiritually and socially valuable feeling, but the Wild Bride is going instead for improbable wish fulfillment and generic uplift.

Another result of her "empowerment" is that she seems to gain her voice, though it’s a little unclear if she was born mute or if muteness just happened early on. In either case “gaining her voice” is such a hacky and obvious symbol that it moved me to eye-rolling rather than wonderment. Why not let her speak all along, like the girl in the original story? Rice has given her a voice, but not really anything to say. Rice sure likes to pile on the Bride’s suffering. And indeed it did seem to be one of those stories in which we are invited to luxuriate in the spectacle of a woman’s endless victimization, with a bit of bogus “empowerment” slapped on at the end to make the self-pitying wallow acceptable – the spoonful of medicine that helps the sugar go down.

The King returns, finds out what has happened, and goes searching for his wife and child in the forest, where grief and solitude drive him mad. He is cured when they are reunited. So the Devil comes back to collect his beloved Bride, and – she punches him a couple of times and he falls down in defeat and then runs off.

And that's all. That's it.

Let me step back for a minute here to the original story, which turns out to be a story of suffering redeemed by piety and goodness – the tale of a dutiful daughter. Her father is not a vaguely comic drunkard, but a poor, frightened man whom the Devil tricks and then terrifies into cutting off his daughter’s hands. He explains his dilemma to her and she, like Iphigenia stepping between her warring parents, freely offers herself as a sacrifice. She also has the dignity to then refuse the help of her now-wealthy father, and wanders off, where her goodness and piety gain her an angel helper, both in the pear orchard where she meets the King and in the forest with her child, where she is eventually reunited with her husband through the angel's help.

The problem is not that Rice has altered what is after all a fairly grotesque tale of a woman who is rewarded for her pious submission. It’s that she hasn’t put anything dramatically or psychologically convincing in its place. Sorry, the whole final scene fell as flat and as quickly as the Devil, and he took a dive like a regular patsy. I kept assuming this would be one of those stories where a clever, brave girl outwits the Devil. Nope. It just took a left hook. (It's like seeing The Merchant of Venice only when Portia stands up at the trial, she doesn't blather on about the quality of mercy or taking the flesh but not any blood, she just walks over to Shylock and slugs him, and then the case is dismissed.) For someone who fights dirty and has supernatural powers, the Devil sure gives up easily. So why didn’t she punch him earlier? If she now has super boxing powers thanks to her life experiences, then what has she learned and how has she changed and grown? We’re not told, except for that little “empowerment” dance, which was mildly entertaining but not really enough to defeat the Devil. If he couldn’t touch her earlier because she was too good for him, why doesn’t he have the same problem now, since she’s not only still good, she’s better? If her hands had to be chopped off because otherwise they were too clean for the Devil to endure, why isn’t he also put off by her regenerated hands?

The play is a mash-up of the plights of Griselda and Job (with a dash of Faust), with the Devil taking the place of Griselda’s paranoid husband. The Devil describes the story early in Act 2 as "a feminist fairy tale," with (I'm quoting from memory, so this isn't exact) a bit of everything: humor, thrills, excitement (end attempted quotation, and I kind of resented being told this, as if I were at a restaurant and the chef came out halfway through the meal and told me that I was certainly enjoying my dinner, and it had everything I like – thanks, but I can taste for myself). But – even granted that “feminism” is a capacious and slippery term – in what serious way is this feminist?

The Wild Bride remains a passive victim throughout, until that last scene, which I found unconvincing and arbitrary in the play’s own terms, a slapped-on and modish "happy ending." The Bride doesn’t do anything: she doesn’t use her wit or cunning, she isn't particularly brave or bold. She isn't actively good, and doesn’t even get to be pious and pray for help, since this is a world which contains devils (though their power seems to vary considerably, depending on dramatic convenience) but no angels. If she’s learned anything, we don’t know what it is. Look, this isn’t Chekhov – it would have fit in perfectly with the tone of the piece to have the Bride impart some rhyming wisdom to us, some cheerful words about fighting back or not trusting the Devil or maybe even just laying off the moonshine, Dad.

There’s an interview with Rice in the playbill in which she announces “I’m not a huge lover of words. I do use words in my work, but I always think they’re the sprinkle on top.” Yeah, that would explain why the staging is so often striking and even poetic but the words are mundane and the action often doesn’t make sense outside of its immediate moment. The tone shifts wildly and unevenly; sometimes horrible things are treated terrifyingly and sometimes comically; sometimes the Devil is all-powerful and sometimes he’s laughable and weak. It all seems to depend on what’s dramatically convenient at the moment, and whether the performance needs to be goosed a bit with some vaudeville laughs or some thrills and chills, as opposed to what makes sense in the overall context of these characters and what happens to them.

I could have gotten past most of this, if Rice hadn’t let me down in the big scene. Where was the clever heroine I was expecting?

As the auditorium was filling up before the show, I noticed a woman with her little dark-haired son. I think he was the youngest person there. Seeing him made me think of going to the theater with my mother when I was a child. As I was leaving, I saw his eyes shining as his mother asked him if he wanted to go up and look at the stage. I hope they enjoyed the performance. Would I have, when I was his age? I no longer know.

Haiku 2012/10

2012-01-10T15:49:00.001-08:00

so I go thank you
blue starry night stretching out
silent horizons

Haiku 2012/9

2012-01-09T10:20:00.000-08:00

so I keep sneezing
so this lady goes, "Bless you!"
so I go, "Thank you!"

Haiku 2012/8

2012-01-08T14:46:00.000-08:00

Nature is chancy
skies are warm so flowers bloom
so I keep sneezing

Haiku 2012/7

2012-01-07T20:50:00.001-08:00

unyielding hard place
while the rest of the fruit rots:
Nature is chancy

Haiku 2012/6

2012-01-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

unable to move:
O stern unrelenting rock!
unyielding hard place!

Haiku 2012/5

2012-01-05T15:53:00.000-08:00

a breath on the neck
crammed in the commuter trains
unable to move

Haiku 2012/4

2012-01-04T15:16:00.001-08:00

soft velvety dark
caressed by warm unseen hands
a breath on the neck

Haiku 2012/3

2012-01-03T20:12:00.000-08:00

cats slinking away

shadows hidden in shadows

soft velvety dark

fun stuff I may or may not get to: January 2012

2012-01-02T17:53:00.000-08:00

I assume it's wishful thinking that makes everyone say that things slow down at the end of a year. I've been more pressed for time than ever, and have once again fallen behind on what I've already seen, which is bad because there's a lot more on the way.

I did have some thoughts about doing a "best/worst" list for 2011, an idea I dismissed for various reasons, laziness and lack of time among them. But also: the calendar year doesn't really coincide with the performing arts year; there were things I enjoyed even though "good" (let alone "best") would probably be an overly generous assessment; there were things that were very good that I just wasn't in the mood for; there were things that were good but were spoiled by rude audiences or by the on-going plague of director/conductor speeches from the stage; there were things that were memorable mostly for one or two performers. . . . it all started to get very blurry and confusing, and as already noted I had too much else to do (so much party cheese left over to eat! and which leftover crackers should I put which cheese on first?), so I decided anyone interested could just go back over my previous year's entries and come up with an individualized list of what I liked best, bearing in mind that everything hasn't been covered yet since 2011 posts will be continuing into 2012.

I will mention the worst of 2011, though, because it wasn't even close, with no deliberation required, and I need to get my money's worth by figuratively holding this work's head under water until the bubbles stop coming up. Maestro, a drumroll please! The worst thing I saw last year was easily the relentlessly superficial and dishonest Heart of a Soldier. David Gockley has certainly not added much luster to his reputation as a commissioner of new operas during his time here in the Bay Area. When you throw in (or out) the equally worthless Bonesetter's Daughter, you have to hope that someone over War Memorial way is noticing that there's a problem when operas are inspired mostly by marketing opportunities (the large Chinese-American population in the Bay Area, the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks).

Well, en avant:

The San Francisco Symphony presents Christian Tetzlaff in the Ligeti Violin Concerto on 6-8 January. Michael Tilson Thomas conducts and the program also includes Liszt's Prometheus and Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 1, Winter Daydreams. Then the week after (12-14 January, to be exact), Tilson Thomas conducts Janacek's Sinfonietta and Debussy's Le martyre de Saint Sebastien, with excellent soloists (Karina Gauvin, Sasha Cooke, and Leah Wool) and narration by Frederica von Stade.

Cal Performances presents Susan Graham on 14 January (I have no idea what she's singing, but, you know, it's Susan Graham! Isn't that enough?) and the new-music group the Eco Ensemble on 21 January.

San Francisco Performances continues its awesome vocalist series with Christopher Maltman on 19 January (rescheduled from last year) and Dawn Upshaw on 28 January. [UPDATE, 6 January: Upshaw's recital is being rescheduled for 1 April. Details should be at SFP's site soon.]

Berkeley Rep has extended the run for The Wild Bride until 22 January, which is nice for me, since now I get to see it.

ACT presents Lorenzo Pisoni in his one-man show, Humor Abuse, from 12 January to 5 February.

San Francisco Ballet opens its season with the evening-length Onegin, starting 27 January.

Cutting Ball Theater 's Hidden Classics series continues its Strindbergpalooza on 29 January with a double bill of Miss Julie and A Dream Play.

Haiku 2012/2

2012-01-02T17:46:00.000-08:00

slipping out of sight

clouds drifting over the moon

cats slinking away

Haiku 2012/1

2012-01-01T21:02:00.000-08:00

arbitrary hours

driven by the random winds

slipping out of sight

one for the new year

2012-01-01T00:25:00.000-08:00

from Philip Larkin:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Peace to all in the new year, and deepest thanks to all who stop by here, either occasionally or frequently.

Haiku 2011/365

2011-12-31T18:47:00.000-08:00

a gleam in the eye

illuminating briefly

arbitrary hours

Haiku 2011/364

2011-12-30T20:01:00.000-08:00

sunlight on diamonds

shining through a shop window

a gleam in the eye

Haiku 2011/363

2011-12-29T21:02:00.000-08:00

sweetly in the breeze
raindrops shake from black branches
sunlight on diamonds

Haiku 2011/362

2011-12-28T14:58:00.000-08:00

there should be songbirds
and fruited garlands swaying
sweetly in the breeze

Haiku 2011/361

2011-12-27T20:23:00.000-08:00

stretching into mist
granite mountain memories
there should be songbirds

Haiku 2011/360

2011-12-26T21:59:00.000-08:00

shining with the dawn
ribbon of road unspooling
stretching into mist

Haiku 2011/359

2011-12-25T20:21:00.000-08:00

once-desired object
once distant as the mountains
shining with the dawn

Christmas medley

2011-12-25T03:11:00.000-08:00

enjoy the Georges de la Tour lighting effects

California Christmas 1: blue and orange

California Christmas 2: city lights

indoors at St Patrick's in New York, two years ago: I love the sly sarcastic look on the camel's face, as if he's going to get off a good quip - he's the Dorothy Parker of beasts of burden!

from a recent New Yorker - hilarity from the great Danny Shanahan

Haiku 2011/358

2011-12-24T17:08:00.000-08:00

replaced by others
back on the shelf you shall go
once-desired object

let nothing you dismay, part 2

2011-12-23T14:46:00.000-08:00

I was passing through the Westfield Mall today to sneer at people who still had Christmas shopping to do when I overhead a youngish man saying, "With my sensibility, I would tend to get them joke gifts."

If phrases like "my sensibility" are part of your everyday vocabulary, you really aren't the sort of person who should be buying joke gifts.

Haiku 2011/357

2011-12-23T14:41:00.000-08:00

I turn and they're gone:
clouds, trees, days, buildings, people
replaced by others

Haiku 2011/356

2011-12-22T14:01:00.000-08:00

temporary dawn
shifting shades at shifting hours
I turn and they're gone

for the solstice: lost gloves (plus one)

2011-12-22T04:01:00.000-08:00

These are all from my last trip to New York City, which was two winters ago.

Haiku 2011/355

2011-12-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

a streak of pale pink
suddenly receding blush
temporary dawn

Haiku 2011/354

2011-12-20T15:26:00.000-08:00

vast unending blue
dimpled with white: waves or stars
a streak of pale pink

Haiku 2011/353

2011-12-19T21:29:00.000-08:00

little clouds escape
fleeing westward with the wind
vast unending blue

stoned

2011-12-18T16:05:00.000-08:00

If you're interested in medieval and/or baroque sculpture, the Legion of Honor has a couple of small temporary exhibits you shouldn't miss.

First are the Burgundian mourners in their alabaster hoodies. They've been on display for a few months but will be leaving with the year, so if you've been putting off the admittedly onerous trip up to the Legion you only have a couple more weeks if you want to see them.

You have a little longer (until 19 February 2012) to see the Medusa by the great baroque sculptor and architect Bernini, on loan from the Musei Capitolini in Rome, a city memorably shaped by the buildings, sculptures, and fountains he designed.

As with his famous Apollo and Daphne, Bernini depicts the moment of metamorphosis, thereby displaying at their height both the psychological drama of the sculpture and his ability to capture varying textures (hair, snakeskin, flesh, cloth, limbs and leaves) in a single block of marble.

The once beautiful and vain Medusa is suddenly aware that the vindictive (or just) gods are punishing her arrogance with a transformation that will literally petrify with horror those who look on her.

The Bernini is on display in the museum's baroque gallery (take time to admire their fine Guercino!), but classical fragments can also be found elsewhere.

Haiku 2011/352

2011-12-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

air so clear and cold
as we stroll through the garden
little clouds escape

Haiku 2011/351

2011-12-17T14:12:00.000-08:00

wonder at the time
cheerful points of pointless light
air so clear and cold

Haiku 2011/350

2011-12-16T18:42:00.000-08:00

hopping without plan
frantic last-minute shoppers
wonder at the time

Haiku 2011/349

2011-12-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

little random birds
in arbitrary landscapes
hopping without plan

love the one you're with

2011-12-14T21:27:00.000-08:00

Last month at San Francisco Opera I was at the second performance of Handel’s Xerxes, a company premiere presented in Nicholas Hytner’s long-lived production from the English National Opera. (Michael Walling was the revival director.) I was in London the year after its premiere and as a general sign of devotion to Handel I bought the poster in the ENO shop, though the opera itself wasn’t on the schedule during my time there. Decades of going to baroque operas, and before last month I had never seen a live performance of Xerxes! I did at one point see the DVD of the ENO production, which was sung in English translation, since that is (or was) ENO’s house policy, a policy which explains why they called Handel’s Serse Xerxes; SF Opera kept that version of the name, although the opera was sung here in Italian. Presumably the name was left as Xerxes to avoid confusing people.

Speaking of confusing people, companies really should omit plot summaries in the program books for most baroque operas. Several years ago one of SF Opera’s training programs presented Handel's Ezio, which I attended with V. She was looking at the program and I saw a look of baffled panic start to appear on her face. I said, “You’re reading the synopsis, aren’t you? Don’t. It will confuse you completely. It’s full of things like ‘A, disguised as the shepherd B, is pursued by the tyrant C, though she loves D, who is traveling under the name of E, and is seeking revenge on F. . . .’ I guarantee that if you just watch the action it will all make perfect sense. If you read the synopsis, you will be completely confused forever.” Never read the synopsis for baroque opera: this is infallible advice for understanding the stage action.

Anyway, as for Xerxes: on the whole, it was beautifully sung in a stylish production, though I had the sad feeling that under different circumstances I would have been enjoying it more than I can honestly say I did. For one thing, it was a Friday night, and even with a 7:30 start time it is a long evening (nearly four hours) at the end of a work week. My regular subscription, back when I had one, was on Friday nights, so I had to keep reminding myself that I was often tired on those nights too, as otherwise the evening was a depressing reminder of what aging does to our involvement even in things we love.

Also, the people around me, obviously immersed in the movement towards historically-informed performance practice, were behaving with authentic eighteenth-century rudeness: there was lots of chatting, coughing, smooching, and so forth during the performance, particularly from a group of egregious Germans right in front of me. One of them was a woman with an extremely large head, which was blocking quite a bit of the stage. Since I was in the second row and am over six feet tall, I just wasn’t expecting my view to be blocked (yes, I know that sometimes people behind me are not happy to be behind me). I wish audience behavior didn’t affect me so much, but it does. There may be a secret to the ability to concentrate completely on the multitudinous sights and actions and noises from the stage while simultaneously blocking out everything else, but I have sadly not been able to discover it.

At the end of the first act the bald German man announced that “this is different from Wagner” – in fact he said it twice – and then he and his gang disappeared during the second act, which as a result I enjoyed quite a bit more. Unfortunately they returned for Act 3. I don’t know where they were in the meantime, or how they managed to adjust themselves to the tremendous discovery that Handel is not like Wagner.

So all along I’m feeling that this will possibly be my only chance to see this opera live – certainly it’s my only chance to experience this particular performance, for which I paid quite a lot – and for reasons not having much to do with the work itself, I’m feeling fairly low and let-down. Very sad for me.

Well, I did have one major complaint about the performance: much of the acting was too cartoony for me. You don’t need me to tell you that Susan Graham was commanding and sang beautifully as Xerxes, but Xerxes’s arbitrary and peremptory love for Romilda (Lisette Oropesa), the beloved of his brother Arsamenes (David Daniels) . . . damn, I wanted to avoid the plot summaries! Anyway, the interlocking love affairs were too frequently played for goofiness. The comic situations are more comic if those involved are clearly very serious about what they’re doing. (This also is infallible advice.)

And the situations aren’t all comic: Xerxes is an absolute monarch, used to having his way, and there should be a sense of real danger when he threatens the lovers who oppose his will. Otherwise there just isn’t much at stake. The action of the opera begins with Xerxes's celebrated aria, Ombra mai fu, whose flowing and noble beauty might obscure the fact that this all-powerful king, who could kill thousands with a mere gesture, is singing a love song to a tree. Xerxes is beyond whimsical and into unbalanced, and that’s obviously a dangerous quality in a person of unchecked powers.

I certainly don’t mean to single out Graham’s performance for this criticism, since she was one example among many. Maybe that is why I was particularly impressed by the Atalanta of Heidi Stober (Atalanta, the sister of Romilda, is secretly in love with Arsamenes, and therefore claims falsely to Xerxes that – argh, I’ve fallen into another plot summary!). She managed to avoid caricature and make a basically appalling woman, manipulative, selfish, and dishonest, into someone sympathetic and understandable. Added to the favorable impression she made in the very different role of Sophie in Werther, I have to say, she’s a singer I’m looking forward to experiencing again. Yes, she also sang with striking beauty, but that alone wouldn’t have set her apart in a cast that included Graham and David Daniels. Lisette Oropesa also held her own in this company, and I have to mention Michael Sumuel, who was genuinely funny as Arsamenes’s servant Elviro (he’s a servant, so he’s meant to be comic).

Haiku 2011/348

2011-12-14T15:14:00.001-08:00

ripples on a lake
silver-gray mist settles in
little random birds

let nothing you dismay

2011-12-13T20:15:00.000-08:00

I realized the other day that it didn't feel like Christmas because I hadn't heard anybody say that it doesn't feel like Christmas.

Haiku 2011/347

2011-12-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

the stillness of night
the moon's impartial silver
ripples on a lake

Haiku 2011/346

2011-12-12T14:52:00.001-08:00

dancing like the stars
headlights flash up rain-slick roads
the stillness of night

Raj rage

2011-12-11T20:27:00.000-08:00

The large upside-down A is the museum's eminently mockable new logo. It symbolizes plunging attendance or something.

A while ago I made an attempt to see the new exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, Maharajah: The Splendor of India's Royal Courts. It was a Thursday night, before a concert, and it was the last Thursday of the year with late hours at the Asian, so it should have been perfect, except it wasn't because it was one of the museum's occasional stupid party nights. Sometimes those are easily ignored, but their website description of this one prominently mentioned a DJ, which should have been warning enough, but denial is, as they say, not just a river in Egypt.

They do have a nice cafeteria and an elegant gift shop. And there I am in the lower right-hand corner.

It was the nightmare I could have predicted if I had been realistic. By the time I realized how bad it would be it was too late to do anything else, but too early to go sit in the lobby of Herbst Theater. Getting into the museum took even longer than usual. The lobby was packed with people standing in very long lines for something – food or alcohol, I think – and walking anywhere required maneuvering around the immobile masses. Art didn’t seem to be on anyone’s mind. I went into the cafeteria (no line) and I ate my Indian-themed dinner to the brain-dead thump-thump-thump the DJ was inflicting on us.

This delightful picture across a lobby wall is promoting another new exhibit I haven't seen yet, Deities, Demons, and Dudes with 'Staches, featuring the attractively stylized and colorful work of Sanjay Patel, an artist at the Royal Court of Pixar.

I tried to see the new exhibit. Those rooms weren't as jammed as the lobby, but each object had one to three people listening to the audio tour planted in front of it, and since many of the pieces seemed to be fairly small and elaborately detailed paintings, it was going to be impossible to see anything, and besides the brain-dead thump-thump-thump was loud and unending. So here is what I managed to gather in a quick look: lots of gold, lots of silver, several small jewel-like paintings.

This bas-relief is from the permanent collection: the great Monkey King is bringing his troops to someone's aid (not mine).

I went to the second floor to look at Japanese art, hoping to escape the noise. Here are cranes flying! thump-thump-thump Here are peonies blooming! Thump-thump-thump I went up to the top floor to look at the regular Indian art collection. Here is Shiva! thump-thump-thump Here is a tiger hunt! THUMP-THUMP-THUMP

I finally couldn’t take it any longer and fled into the night, wondering if I should bother to renew my membership in the Asian Art Museum. Since I work, the Thursday evening hours are the best time for me to visit. It's a great place to go before a Thursday night concert in Civic Center. But they don't have the late hours in November and December, which are prime concert months. And about once a month they take over Thursday evenings with one of these events. And here’s the thing: if I wanted to listen to shit music amplified to a deafening volume, with my path steadily blocked by oblivious assholes nursing their grossly overpriced trendoid drinks while ignoring me and trying to pick each other up, then I would just go to a bar. And there are dozens of such places. As far as I know, there is only one place in the vicinity where you can go to look at Asian art. Why would an organization ignore its unique advantage and try to become a more expensive and inconvenient version of what is easily available in a dozen other places?

Haiku 2011/345

2011-12-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

a vanishing breath
little flowers briefly nod
dancing like the stars

Haiku 2011/344

2011-12-10T15:46:00.000-08:00

a flash, then nothing
a big noise, and then silence
a vanishing breath

Haiku 2011/343

2011-12-09T17:01:00.000-08:00

shoreline memories
rise and sink just out of sight
a flash, then nothing

Haiku 2011/342

2011-12-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

particles of sand
shaken from our summer shoes
shoreline memories

Haiku 2011/341

2011-12-07T09:19:00.000-08:00

O our liquid time
light waves lap and overlap
particles of sand

Haiku 2011/340

2011-12-06T09:04:00.000-08:00

melting into night
then dissolving into day
O our liquid time

Haiku 2011/339

2011-12-05T18:16:00.000-08:00

day's unblinking eye
sinking low on the skyline
melting into night

Haiku 2011/338

2011-12-04T19:06:00.000-08:00

cloud-occluded skies
heavy lid dropping over
day's unblinking eye

avowals

2011-12-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

Old First Concerts offers a reliably interesting and entertaining line-up, and their $17 ticket price is one of the best arts bargains around; unfortunately for me, their concerts are almost always at 8:00 on Friday nights, which I’ve decided is possibly the worst time for performances. After a draining and tedious work week, generally the last thing I want to do with my exhaustion is carry it around aimlessly, wasting three-plus hours before a show even starts. One side effect of the ongoing Internetification of the World is the disappearance of many of the book or record stores where I used to be able to while away the hours in a more or less pleasing way. At least on Thursday nights some of the museums are open. There are simply not many places for me to go and not much for me to do now that won’t leave me feeling bored, irritated, and conscious of wasting time I could have spent better, and that's no way to walk into a concert.

Anyway, I did go up to Old First Church a couple of Fridays ago for the return of Euouae. I hadn’t walked up Van Ness that far (up to Sacramento Street) in a while, I guess, because I was surprised at the number of boarded-up businesses and restaurants I saw, some of them places that had been there for years. I was kind of tired but a better kind of tired than usual, since I had taken time off work and was wearing myself out in more interesting places.

Euouae made its maiden voyage at an earlier concert at Old First, which I wrote about here. This time director Steven Sven Olbash presented Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Sub tuum praesidium, interspersed with pieces by Josquin Des Prez and Perotin, as well as St Gall and Messine chants, the whole creating a service in honor of the Virgin Mary. In practical, sitting-in-the-audience terms, what this combination does is vary the texture of the music enough so that you can sit there for the duration (about 70 minutes or so) and not feel hypnotized by the lack of variety.

Euouae’s founding belief is that “music, being made of sound, cannot be written down.” Olbash also says (this information is coming from the program book, though you can also check out Euouae’s official website for more information) that they use rehearsal techniques employed before the tenth century. I don’t know what those techniques are, but then I’m not a choral singer and don’t know what current rehearsal techniques are either. Obviously something not written down is simply going to be lost unless interpretive traditions and techniques are handed down with an unchanged understanding, which requires what we have never had, a stable and uniform culture in which singers and audience share common assumptions. So I think what Olbash is getting at here is that they are trying to create or re-create the music, or a music, anew – that whatever antiquarian research lies behind the performance, the most important authenticity is of style and spirit. In short, the letter kills but the spirit gives life.

I decided early on in the performance not to keep checking the order of pieces in the program or the translations (though of course it's easy enough to keep track of the parts belonging to the Mass) or to ponder koan-like theories, and just to abandon myself to the aural experience. Let me commend myself for my wisdom in doing so! Olbash started the performance with very brief remarks, saying that he had been criticized at their first concert for talking too much from the stage ( I think I was one of those who said that – it does sound like something I would say), and then he didn’t speak again until the end, so let me commend him for that. At the close of the concert he offered us an unplanned encore of the Agnus Dei, since with rather endearing goofiness he hadn’t noticed that one of the singers wasn’t on stage. So they did it again with the correct number of participants. It reminded me of counting players on the field in football.

Theories and rehearsal techniques may shape the final product but of course are of more importance to the performers than to the audience, which simply gets the results. I found the results as enjoyable as in the first concert; the singers* blend beautifully but with enough individual piquancy to keep the music from sounding too processed or homogenized. There was a strange bandoneon-type instrument (it had a keyboard, so perhaps it was some type of small portable organ) that provided an eerie meditative droning to accompany some of the pieces. There is just something about this sort of chant that brings you into a different world, which of course is what the ancient chanters had in mind all along. It’s penetratingly persuasive, no matter what your reason for sitting in the church and listening.

*Caitlin Austin, Alice Ko, and Rebekah Wu, sopranos; Mary Gerbi and Andrea Kline, mezzo-sopranos; Sara Couden and Emily Ryan, contraltos; Matthew Curtis, tenor; Jeff Phillips and Steven Sven Olbash, baritones.

death becomes them

2011-12-03T19:04:00.000-08:00

I went out to Davies Hall a week or two ago to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct the German Requiem. As I entered the lobby I noticed a number of strikingly beautiful young women in semi-exotic Arabian/stewardess garb (and yes, I mean Arabian as in the Nights, and I mean stewardess and not flight attendant). I cast my eyes downward with appropriate and becoming modesty and made it through unscathed in my self-created burka-aura, though the ladies didn’t seem particularly interested in offering me what they were offering everyone else who passed, which was a chance to win two round-trip Emirates Business Class tickets from San Francisco to Dubai. I know this because the programs contained annoying little red drop-in cards with an entry blank and the news that this was how the Symphony was welcoming Emirates as their official airline. I have no idea what the duties of an official airline are, or how they concern the audience. I was bemused at the thought that a group of people excited about hearing the Brahms Requiem would also be excited about the prospect of a trip to Dubai, which sounds as if it's just a tacky giant mall in the middle of nothingness. “For here we have no continuing city” indeed. For that I can stay in America.

The original plan was for the concert to open with a new piece by Sofia Gubaidulina; sadly she was not able to oblige, but the excellent substitutes were a short choral piece (Ich bin ein rechter Weinstock/I am the true vine) by Heinrich Schutz and Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. Since Schutz was on Brahms’s mind in the Requiem, and since Schoenberg admired Brahms, it all tied together nicely, and I am always happy to hear either Schutz or Schoenberg, let alone both, though it was a little difficult to hear the Schoenberg since the dowager behind me crinkled a plastic bag on her lap for the entire duration of the piece. I had mixed feelings about having an intermission after two short pieces – it would have been interesting to plunge right into the Brahms, I thought, and cumulatively not much longer than some of Mahler’s symphonies – but at least the break gave her a chance to put the bag under her chair, where it should have been all along. There was a young woman behind me with Chica Loca tattooed in sweetly flowing script across the tops of her sweetly flowing breasts. She behaved impeccably, which did not surprise me, since anyone with a Chica Loca tattoo who shows up for Brahms is unquestionably really into him.

I thought the Brahms was magnificent. This piece can seem so familiar, but the performance managed to make it sound new and even strange without taffy-pulling it into pointless eccentricity. I particularly liked the faster tempo for the second movement (Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras/For all flesh is as grass, which might be my favorite movement anyway), which gave it a glowing, lilting, dance-like quality, like some mystical moonlit processional swaying past in the night, mourning with a mysterious joy. The handsome bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen was the male soloist, and there was an extra dimension of poignancy in hearing his supple virile young voice singing of the brevity of life. Jane Archibald was gleaming and evanescent in her movement, as if she were singing to us from a dream. And the chorus was stupendous, as they so regularly are.

Death seems to bring out the best in the Symphony these days: there was their mighty Verdi Requiem, the revelatory Shostakovich 14, and, because he’s always death-haunted, the epic Mahler 3, and this German Requiem joins that company in my mind.

I wanted to go back for another helping of Brahms (Gil Shaham playing the Violin Concerto) with a side of Schoenberg (his orchestration of the Brahms Piano Quartet) the week after, since it was the Friday after Thanksgiving and I had to work anyway and the concert was at 6:30 so I wouldn’t have to wait around too long, but there were no rush tickets available, which might have been just as well since I was so tired that day I didn’t even re-heat turkey when I got home, I just ate pie all evening, and so another day passed.

Haiku 2011/337

2011-12-03T17:42:00.000-08:00

thick-atmosphered night
dank bedraggled blue velvet
cloud-occluded skies

fun stuff I may or may not get to: December 2011

2011-12-02T21:59:00.000-08:00

O December: are you proud of yourself? You've already made Lisa cry. And I'm still trying to get out from under November. And yet you're already here, so here is this year's final round-up of arbitrary and personal cultural possibilities as 2011 winds down:

Volti performs new choral music that explores "the aspects of the divine and the timeless in even the most mundane moments of our lives"; tonight in San Francisco and tomorrow in Berkeley. Further info here.

Shotgun Players present God's Plot, written and directed by Mark Jackson, whose work is always interesting.

The San Francisco Symphony has an outstanding program on 8-10 December: Leila Josefowicz and Christine Brewer join Esa-Pekka Salonen to perform Sibelius's Pohjola's Daughter, excerpts from Wagner's Ring, and Salonen's Violin Concerto, the recent winner of the Grawemeyer Award.

And the great Boston Symphony Orchestra is appearing at Davies Hall (a sad falling off from Boston's Symphony Hall, where I first started attending symphony concerts, but there it is) 6-7 December, with two separate programs, both enticing. Tuesday's concert includes the BSO-commissioned Flute Concerto by Elliott Carter, which is a rare opportunity to hear music by this great American master performed at Davies. (Carter turns 103 on 11 December and is still composing.)

On 8 December the guest conductor Jayce Ogren leads the Berkeley Symphony in the Sibelius 5, Verge by Lei Liang, and Lou Harrison's wonderful Piano Concerto, with Sarah Cahill as the soloist. The Piano Concerto was my introduction to Lou Harrison's music, when I heard it years ago with Ursula Oppens at the Boston Symphony, and it just bowled me over.

Berkeley Rep presents Kneehigh Theater's The Wild Bride, 2 December to 1 January. I missed Kneehigh's Brief Encounter at ACT a couple of years ago, but I heard good things about it. Berkeley Rep sadly for me has a fairly inconvenient performance schedule, and doesn't seem to do rush tickets. And may I just say that I wish performing groups would give you clear information up front about their prices? I don't care that tickets start as low as $3.50 or whatever, since the small print is always that for that price you have to sit in an adjoining building behind a column and watch the show through an open window. I want to know how much a ticket costs in each section without having to click through six screens, and I want to see all seats available. Could we get on that please? Thanks!

Philharmonia Baroque presents the Mass in B Minor 2, 3, 4, and 6 December, in various locations; and Messiah at Zellerbach in Berkeley (in conjunction with Cal Performances) on 10 December.

Magnificat (in conjunction with the San Francisco Early Music Society) presents Schutz's Christmas Story, 16-18 December, in various locations.

Cal Performances presents the Takacs Quartet in works by Janacek, Britten, and Ravel on 4 December.

San Francisco Performances presents the Brentano String Quartet in a program called Fragments, in which living composers complete unfinished works by past composers (4 December); the great Karita Mattila in a song recital with Martin Katz (6 December); and pianist Christian Zacharias playing CPE Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and Schubert (9 December).

And of course there are plenty of Nutcrackers, Christmas Carols, and Messiahs out there. Enjoy the season!

Haiku 2011/336

2011-12-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

blind fish slowly pass
ambient murky waters
thick-atmosphered night

Haiku 2011/335

2011-12-01T15:36:00.001-08:00

in a silent world
patterned shadows slowly wave
blind fish slowly pass

Haiku 2011/334

2011-11-30T15:32:00.000-08:00

hear the floorboards creak
quite the shattering event
in a silent world

D'Oh!

2011-11-29T19:04:00.000-08:00

Would someone please tell me when and why seemingly everyone suddenly started pronouncing the final "t" in Turandot?

According to every source I've seen (you can easily google this stuff, but here's the Wikipedia entry), Puccini himself did not pronounce the final "t," and neither did Rosa Raisa, who created the role, and neither did Toscanini, who conducted the premiere, and neither did Eva Turner, another famous early exponent of the title role. And isn't it obviously more awkward to sing the name with the final "t" pronounced? So why do so many people now think they know better than Eva Turner, Rosa Raisa, Arturo Toscanini, and Puccini himself?

Apparently Puccini's grand-daughter, Simonetta Puccini, favors pronouncing the final "t," with no reason given (and no citation given in Wikipedia, either); though I'm sure she's a lovely woman, there's no genetic authority here; if Puccini's contemporaries, who knew him and worked with him, say that he didn't pronounce the "t," then it shouldn't be pronounced.

As you can see from Wikipedia or other sources, the name derives from a Persian name in which the final "t" is pronounced, which is interesting but irrelevant if the creator of the opera didn't pronounce the name that way. You can also see claims that Carlo Gozzi's play Turandot should have the final "t" pronounced due to the Venetian dialect he spoke, which again is interesting but irrelevant to the opera. No one claims that Verdi's penultimate opera should be pronounced Othello rather than Otello because his source is Shakespeare and Shakespeare has the "th," or that Byron was "wrong" to anglicize the pronunciation of Don Juan into Don Jew-un.

So, seriously, what gives?

(No doubt one reason I feel strongly about this is that the pronunciation of my last name was anglicized by my grandparents (so that it rhymes with "jazz") and I constantly have to correct people who think they are being "authentic," whatever that means.)

the devil's disciple

2011-11-29T18:19:00.000-08:00

The Aurora Theater is currently presenting The Soldier’s Tale by Stravinsky, a dark little fable brightly told about a soldier who foolishly gives the Devil his violin in exchange for riches (well, there's more, but it's better not to know it in advance). Donald Pippin of Pocket Opera did the clever rhymed translation of CF Ramuz’s book, and Jonathan Khuner did the musical arrangement of Stravinsky’s 1918 work, with “musical collaboration” (which I think means “performance,” though maybe they also worked on the arrangements) by Earplay. The music is very attractively jazzy; if I were listening to it cold I would have guessed that at least parts of it were by Kurt Weill in his Berlin days.

I went to a preview performance on a Tuesday, since Aurora’s Tuesday shows start at 7:00. The work is slightly over an hour, so it occurred to me that if they’d started on time (instead of about ten minutes after the hour) we would have been getting out around the time most theaters were just starting their performances. I’d rather have the time after the performance than have to waste it beforehand, so I love the Aurora's Tuesdays.

The show was conceived by former SF Ballet dancer Muriel Maffre, who also played the Daughter of the King, operated the soldier puppet, choreographed the work, and co-directed it with Aurora Artistic Director Tom Ross. Not surprisingly she dances exquisitely and memorably in her bit at the end, though equally memorable in a different way is the Devil’s flailing contorted dance which follows; the Devil, billed as The Devil in Various Disguises, is Joan Mankin, with a wild mop of reddish hair and a progressively greener face. Mankin has a weirdly sexy Lotte Lenya-type vibe going on, and it says a lot for the power of Maffre’s quieter performance, and for L. Peter Callender as the elegant narrator, that they can hold their own against her manic energy.

I do wish they would rethink the design of the marionette soldier, which has a large moon-white cranium tapering down into a narrow pointed chin and dark almond-shaped eyes – the total effect is just too Roswell/Area 51 and I initially found it kind of off-putting. After a while, as with most puppets (except the human kind) I got used to the looks and stopped seeing him as a puppet, but I kept getting occasional space-alien flashes from him.

Other than that, I found the whole thing generally delightful, with enough twists and enough ambiguity to hold the interest. I was amused to see that this work, like Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, also has a key scene involving a card game with the devil featuring the Queen of Hearts; I have no idea what to make of this, but it might make a stumper of a trivia question for those so minded.

This show would make a wonderful holiday treat for sophisticated children. But don't let the lack of children, sophisticated or otherwise, stop you from going, since it's also a wonderful holiday treat for adults (I thought about going to the Nutcracker this year, since I haven’t seen it in many years, but then I realized that I felt kind of pervy going solo to the Nutcracker, which I realize is a weird reaction, but there it is. Anyway, no worries about going solo to this enjoyable show).

It runs through Dec 18; call the box office at 510-843-4822 or go on-line here if you don't mind that they assign you a random seat rather than let you see everything available (I do mind so I always call the box office, and they are always very helpful).

baroque devotions

2011-11-29T17:29:00.000-08:00

A couple of Sundays ago I went back to St Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco for Magnificat’s second concert of the season, devoted mostly to vocal works by Carissimi, with instrumental works between each piece by some of his seventeenth-century Roman compatriots (Michelangelo Rossi, Johann Hieronymus Kapsburger, and Girolamo Frescobaldi).

Magnificat’s first concert this season was just a few weeks earlier, but now the lovely little church was cool instead of sweltering and the glaring sun sank below the windows before the concert started.

The instrumental interludes were nicely played by John Lenti on theorbo and Katherine Heater on organ and harpsichord. (They also accompanied the singers for the four Carissimi numbers.) Since these pieces were meant as devotional aids they are brief and concentrated, and sometimes surprisingly dramatic for Counter Reformation devotions with well-known outcomes. (The sweet delights of music and drama were meant as the hook with which to catch the attention of frivolous sinners.)

First we had the story of Job, which in this version eliminated most of the poetic speculation from the biblical story in favor of swift and unambiguous action: the Devil destroys Job’s family and property, a heavenly Angel gives him spiritual strength, and so he refuses to curse God. There’s a compelling trio at the end, with the same general participants and outcome as the trio at the end of Gounod’s Faust.

The next piece was a vivid warning about what will happen at the Last Judgment, sung so sweetly that being reduced to dust and ashes seemed rather appealing. The third piece was a straightforward setting of Luke’s story about the disciples traveling unawares with the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus.

The final piece was the story of Jephte (Jeptha) and his daughter, a magnificent setting that is shorter and grimmer than Handel’s great oratorio on the subject. There is no eighteenth-century happy ending imposed here, but lamentations for the death of Jeptha’s virgin daughter, the victim of his rash oath. Carissimi’s setting may lack the subtle and extended drama of Handel’s, but then he’s trying for something very different, something swift and clear that lingers in the mind afterwards.

The excellent singers were Catherine Webster, Jennifer Ellis Kampani, and Jennifer Paulino, sopranos; Andrew Rader, alto; and Paul Elliott, tenor. Warren Stewart led the ensemble. As I left the church I was very happy to have subscribed to Magnificat, since if I hadn’t already bought a ticket I probably wouldn’t have trekked out there in the middle of a very busy month.

Their next concert, presented with the San Francisco Early Music Society on December 16-18, is Schutz's Christmas Story, followed in February by Monteverdi madrigals.

the awful truth

2011-11-29T16:29:00.000-08:00

The Kardashians are one of those pop-culture things I know about mostly through parodies, though I do also get updates from the hilariously named "Scoop!" section of the SF Examiner (a right-wing rag which I see because it is literally handed to the commuter crowds as they exit the BART stations, and which I take because it is printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks, making it an excellent addition to the home compost pile). Anyway, yesterday's "Scoop!" quoted one of those inevitable "insiders" on the bitter fall-out from Kim Kardashian's brief marriage to someone named Kris Humphries:

"He tried to control Kim by bringing her down," said the source. "He would say
truly terrible things. One time, he said she had no talent and her fame wouldn't
last."

The brute! I'm sure she's extremely talented at . . . whatever it is she does. Apparently the "insider" repeated this "truly terrible" remark without laughing.

The moral, which like most morals depends on where you're standing, is either that you should avoid your own blabbing "insiders" or that reality stars can't take too much reality.

Haiku 2011/333

2011-11-29T15:04:00.000-08:00

in an empty room
what do the walls remember
hear the floorboards creak!

Haiku 2011/332

2011-11-28T20:51:00.000-08:00

winter's icy light
falls slanting through the windows
in an empty room

Haiku 2011/331

2011-11-27T18:54:00.000-08:00

your eyes burn through me
white glare of a summer noon
winter's icy light

Haiku 2011/330

2011-11-26T23:25:00.000-08:00

unyielding beauty
should you ever look my way
your eyes burn through me

Haiku 2011/329

2011-11-25T18:32:00.000-08:00

let's head back indoors
overwhelmed by winter's cold
unyielding beauty

Haiku 2011/328

2011-11-24T21:16:00.001-08:00

gazing at the sky
some clouds, some birds, some airplanes
let's head back indoors

Haiku 2011/327

2011-11-23T20:09:00.000-08:00

great awkward black birds
hop ungainly on the ground
gazing at the sky

Haiku 2011/326

2011-11-22T19:08:00.000-08:00

lost or abandoned
umbrellas after rainstorms
great awkward black birds

still music

2011-11-21T21:27:00.000-08:00

Maurice Maeterlinck was one of those huge figures who went from omnipresence to obscurity in what seems like the blink of an eye. He’s best remembered for writing the play that ended up as the libretto of Debussy’s great opera, Pelleas et Melisande (though silent movie fans may also know Maurice Tourneur’s lovely 1918 film based on another play, The Blue Bird). Cutting Ball Theater has been presenting a rare opportunity to see Maeterlinck’s original play of Pelleas and Melisande. I went to one of the previews, several Sunday afternoons ago, during a suffocating hot spell, which is strange to remember now that it's so cold.

The story is pretty much as in the opera, though of course it’s not shaped by Debussy’s music. There is ambient music in this production, provided by Cliff Caruthers, which works very well towards helping to create the play’s dislocated atmosphere. Things are not quite what they seem, but not always in the way we think, and if that sounds a bit puzzling and obscurely meaningful, then you’re getting the picture. Rob Melrose, who also did the new translation of the play, sets the work on a long, stripped-down platform that runs down the middle of the theater, with seats banked on either side (not the usual configuration at this theater).

There are dark metal sheets hanging down splashed with pale green paint that conjures up leaves, or maybe moss in a cave, or streaked castle walls, though the medievalism is kept to a minimum, as are the props generally – the actors mime holding objects, and Melisande’s famously long hair is evoked and imagined rather than displayed; for the scene in which Pelleas hangs on to Melisande’s suddenly unloosened hair, the actors lie on the platform, which we now visualize as a vertical wall rather than a horizontal floor, and he reaches up towards where the hair would be, hanging on to what we imagine is there.

The costumes are mostly contemporary, but evocative of other times and places. Melisande’s costumes usually bare her arms, so she looks different from and fragile next to the other characters. Pelleas wears a dark ski vest with a row of trees subtly silhouetted across the bottom, over a dark green T-shirt (I actually sat there wondering where they’d gotten that shirt, which I really liked; it looked like something you could get from Eddie Bauer, but it also worked as a costume evoking the outdoors where he and Melisande meet).

There are lots of elements that seem obviously “symbolic” – the sun, the night, the sea, the caves, journeying, her hair, the ring she loses – but much is left suggestively unexplained, and the play’s power comes from the shifting meanings and general instability of the symbols, which always seem about to collapse into dream-land or other subconscious realms.

Obviously there’s a danger here of being overly precious and vague, which Melrose and the actors successfully avoid. As I’ve indicated, the more obviously fairy-tale or antique elements, though not eliminated, are handled so that the story doesn’t become merely picturesque or old-time storybookish. Caitlyn Louchard does an outstanding job suggesting the indrawn, haunted Melisande, without lapsing into annoying feyness; you feel Melisande is being as direct as she can be, or can allow herself to be.

But it was the performances of the brothers Golaud (Derek Fischer) and Pelleas (Jonathan Schell) that gave me a pleasant surprise because – I can’t think of any other way to put this – given the temptations of the material, they were surprisingly masculine. They could easily have been vaguely gauzy fairy-tale princes; these seemed like actual guys you might actually meet, struggling with love and jealousy and loss. Yet there was enough strangeness in them – a suggestion of willful blindness or hurtful sensitivity – to provide the instability as well as the strength the script calls for. (Among the rest of the cast I also particularly liked Paul Gerrior as Arkel, the ruler of exhausted wisdom.)

Maeterlinck supposedly lost favor when the theater turned towards “realism,” but this production made me ponder the slippery nature not just of "realism" but of reality. The performance is about an hour and forty minutes, with no intermission to break the mood, and the somber heat, heavy and suffocating and unusual for the time of year, began to seem like one of the play’s elements of definite but not quite definable significance. Heading home on the train afterwards, I was trapped in front of a man practically shouting into his cell phone, telling his friend over and over that Tricia had discovered photos that Tasha had taken of herself wearing one of Tricia’s nightgowns, posed on Tricia’s bed – which I assumed she shared with this man, but maybe not; it really wasn’t clear how the three were related – was Tasha an ex-lover? a daughter? a sister? Whatever was going on there, it was clear this man felt that what might in other circumstances be a minor incident (borrowing another woman's outfit, sitting on her bed) was in this case freighted with deep emotion and constituted a shocking betrayal. I was still under the spell of the performance, and this incident, right down to the strange similarity in the names of the two women, seemed like a forgotten episode from what I had just seen, and like a validation of Maeterlinck’s method.

The show runs through November 27, so you have a few more chances to catch it. Get tickets here.

Haiku 2011/325

2011-11-21T20:11:00.000-08:00

washed away by waves
whatever day left behind
lost or abandoned

art & life at SFMoMA

2011-11-20T20:06:00.000-08:00

Duchamp's Fountain from the permanent collection on the second floor and a urinal from the fifth floor men's room

Haiku 2011/324

2011-11-20T19:15:00.000-08:00

gulls spring into flight
little fork-tracks on wet sand
washed away by waves

Haiku 2011/323

2011-11-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

see unceasing seas
rush against exhausted shores
gulls spring into flight

Haiku 2011/322

2011-11-18T16:45:00.000-08:00

wave slaps against wave
see-saw sea, are you seasick
see unceasing seas

Haiku 2011/321

2011-11-17T23:27:00.000-08:00

then to blackest blue
stormy sky, surging ocean
wave slaps against wave

Haiku 2011/320

2011-11-16T18:50:00.000-08:00

dissolving in night
blue skies turn pale pink and gold
then to blackest blue

Haiku 2011/319

2011-11-15T18:52:00.000-08:00

hard world grown harder
high towers merge into clouds
dissolving in night

piano piano piano

2011-11-14T20:44:00.000-08:00

I went to hear Marc-Andre Hamelin at his recent recital in Herbst Theater, which featured works by Berg, Liszt, and Hamelin himself.

The Berg Piano Sonata, Opus 1, and the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor fit well together; the Berg is quite romantic in sound, with intimations that something more jagged is coming, and the Liszt also takes familiar forms and pushes them to emotional extremes. Hamelin of course is a famous virtuoso and his playing is immaculate, clear and powerful and bracing like a high mountain stream. His playing is not demonstrative or showy. I think he is one of those artists for whom intense emotion comes through the expression of form.

There was an odd and disturbing incident at the close of the first half. Hamelin had just barely finished the Liszt sonata, his hands still suspended in air, when some oaf smashed the mood with loud, insistent applause that chased the final sounds of the sonata out of the hall. This idiot continued applauding even though no one else joined in for another minute or two. It was actually physically jarring. I realized both how deeply I had been drawn into the music and how fragile the whole concert-going experience is. What struck me as really weird was that this person was obviously very familiar with the piece, since the applause started the millisecond it ended, when there were no physical signals (lowered hands, slumped shoulders, a turn towards the audience) that it had ended, yet he or she was completely immune to the mood set by the music. And during the intermission of course much talk was about the applause-clod rather than the performance, which was a sad but inevitable reaction, since reactions to the Sonata were mostly interior, varied, and personal, while the applause was a communal violation.

I was so shaken by the weird rudeness that I was kind of surprised when Hamelin stuck to his program and played his own works for us – I thought he might decide we weren’t worthy, especially since the first piece was the world premiere of Theme and Variations (Cathy’s Variations), which Hamelin described in the program as “purely the work of a man in love . . . inspired by my fiancée Cathy Fuller, my true soulmate, who fascinates me more with each passing day.” These words seemed almost shockingly naked to me when I read them in the program before the concert, and made me realize what an interesting virtuoso Hamelin is, because as a performer he seems quite low-key and contained and his extremely deep emotions are enacted purely through sound.

It was a lovely piece and I decided I should get a copy of his recording of his own works. We also had the Variations on a theme of Paganini, and three etudes, Nos. 8, 11, and 12. No. 8 is based on Goethe’s Erlkonig, and though musically distinct from Schubert’s lied that famous setting kind of shadows the piece because that’s how most of us know the poem, so when listening to Hamelin’s version and sorting out the characters our roadmap is not so much Goethe’s words but Goethe’s words as we remember them to Schubert’s music.

For this concert I was in the front row center on the left aisle, so I had a clear view of the pianist’s hands. I know this view is prized, but I’m sometimes a bit indifferent to it: I’m not sure what looking at the hands is really going to tell me. It sometimes seems a bit fetishistic. There’s a documentary (whose name I’ve forgotten) which I saw years ago which shows Picasso creating a painting before our eyes (until he ends up cheerfully saying, “Now I’ve ruined it and it’s no good”), and sure I can watch his hands move the brush but that doesn’t tell me much about why or how he’s deciding to do things a certain way. But I was glad for the view of Hamelin’s hands, because they actually were revealing. Quite a few times I looked at them and they were literally blurs, they were moving so fast. But if I’d shut my eyes I would have heard crystalline sound and control.

That was the first concert in San Francisco Performance’s piano series. Then last Saturday I was at the SF Conservatory of Music for the second in the series, the Bay Area debut of Alexander Melnikov, who played the complete set of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87, in one three hour concert, with two brief intermissions.

Melnikov is another restrained virtuoso; with his quiet, almost scholarly and slightly amused demeanor, and his all-black suit and shirt (no tie, but what looked slightly like a Roman collar) – even the handkerchief he used occasionally to dab away the sweat was black – he looked quite sacerdotal. Even the little bald spot on his crown looked like a tonsure.

Three hours sounds like a long time to listen to music by one composer for one instrument, but it flew by. This time the audience was in harmony, with very few disruptions except for the occasional turn of a page in the program or the score (several people were following along with scores). Melnikov is a mostly undemonstrative player to the eye though not the ear. Occasionally he would nod when he wanted the page-turner to turn the page. Towards the end he paused briefly between pieces to shake out his shoulders a bit. Shostakovich’s music is mostly inward (and therefore a more decisive rejection of totalitarianism than many ambiguously sarcastic and bombastic marches), and it is constantly varied and fascinating, an Aladdin’s cave gleaming in the gloom of a November afternoon. Really a magnificent and rare occasion.

Haiku 2011/318

2011-11-14T18:10:00.001-08:00

we scurry indoors
icy streets and icy stares
hard world grown harder

Haiku 2011/317

2011-11-13T20:38:00.000-08:00

under soft gray skies
frost trims the wilting grasses
we scurry indoors

Haiku 2011/316

2011-11-12T19:19:00.000-08:00

bitten by winter
gardens slink into grayness
under soft gray skies

Haiku 2011/315

2011-11-11T21:41:00.000-08:00

huddled together
summer fruits on tangled vines
bitten by winter

Haiku 2011/314

2011-11-10T21:40:00.000-08:00

while the wind whistled
silent birds seeking shelter
huddled together